Filed under animal paintings, Creativity
Alluring with Amal-Save Trees Save Earth-via Cathy Ruggiero
Filed under Awe-Inspiring Photography
I found poor, neglected Amber like this awhile ago. She had only been out three times this morning, once with my husband playing ball with her, so I took pity on her and took her out again.
A cold front came through about 1am, bringing lots of rain (FINALLY!) and cooler temperatures through the end of the week, we hope. I went out, jacket on, dog zapper in one hand, coffee in the other, dog treats in my right jeans pocket, to see what the storm had wrought.
We went first to see if the greenhouse and the ham radio tower were still up after all the high wind. Both are doing fine. Whew!
Amber found wonderful branches in the yard, picking them up and running around like a mad thing with them clamped in her teeth. She had a large one that, when she had one part of it in her mouth, the other part came up across her face making it hard to see out. She still ran around, doing a victory dance, clearly saying, “Look at ME!”
Everything was gloriously wet, and the sky was promising more to come, so we walked from the greenhouse all the way across our property out to the shop and the garden. On the way back to the house I saw one, bright red leaf on the ground. Almost buried by the other leaves, I almost missed it. It has been so dry the whole past month that the leaves were coming down due to lack of water, rather than falling temperatures, so we haven’t had much color here.
Of course, the minute I picked it up, Amber wanted to EAT it. I brought it in so I could take a picture of this sole sign of glorious fall color. It brought up my spirits this morning, and I hope it does the same for you!
Filed under Amazing Animals, Family, Mother Nature
dailypainteresofarkansas.blogspot.com.
pinterest.com
Filed under animal paintings, Creativity
Our friend, Carla, called a few minutes ago, asking if we could give her a ride to Fort Smith to pick up her car that had been being worked on. We jumped into the truck, picked her up and got her to the Kia service shop with about 10 minutes to spare before they closed for the day. It rained on us – from one cloud – on the way over there, barely enough to need the windshield wipers.
As we got into the rush hour traffic headed for home, though, it started raining more seriously. As we got closer to the Greenwood turnoff, we saw this –
2pat.wordpress.com
This isn’t OUR double rainbow, but it’s very similar to the wonderful gift we experienced from Mother Nature.
When we turned into the road that runs through Greenwood, one rainbow was on either side of the road ahead of us. Just stunningly beautiful!
As we neared home, it was obvious that at our house, the driveway was barely damp. If we hadn’t helped Carla, we would have missed the whole thing.
Not to be TOO greedy, I’m hoping we see a few meteors tonight from the Orionid Meteor Shower.…
Filed under Mother Nature
I just finished my planting for the day. I planted two celery plants from the bottoms I started in the house. (These are easy. Just cut off the bottom 2 inches of each bunch of celery and put them in a dish of water. When they have leaves showing well, transplant them to the garden.) If you want them to look like the bunches you get from the store, tie the little branches together with string. I just let them grow naturally, harvesting individual stalks when they look large enough.
judyscottagegarden.blogspot.com
I told you that I dug out all the iris plants from the new iris planter in the back yard. The planter was totally root-bound (though I’m not sure that’s what you call it with iris). I don’t know how many rhizomes I dug out, but they filled two large buckets. Since I started with 15 plants two years ago, I again chose 15 rhizomes to replant. I’m going to choose several other places before winter to relocate the other ones. My husband wants more up and down the driveway. We’ll also plant some on the way to our shop, plus I want to have at least a couple of iris areas in the back yard. We’re not in a big hurry to do this, as I want to concentrate on weed whacking, lawn edging and weed killing, plus cleaning up flower planters first.
gardenerspath.com
I decided to try to start a head lettuce plant in the same manner I do for celery. I slammed the lettuce on the counter to make the core pop out, then put it in water. I planted the seedling, which looked much like these, except smaller, today. We’ll see how it does.
I took Amber out to the garden this morning. I tried to harvest while she ‘helped me’ by trying to move two large plastic pots from the corner of the garden, take them under one of the raised bed planters and chew on them. I discouraged that, so she found some of the black weed barrier under some of the wood chip mulch and managed to pull some up. At this point, I thanked her for her help and put her on the other side of the fence to roam around until I got to a stopping point.
I harvested some of the largest leaves of the Bibb lettuce and Simpson lettuce.
I pulled up all the radishes. I’ll plant more later today, plus two celery plants and one head lettuce plant I started in the kitchen.
The lone spinach plant is doing very well, giving me 4 nice leaves today. I’ll take some spinach seeds out and plant them, as well today.
Also on my schedule is to re-plant several of the Iris rhizomes I dug up and separated this week. I’ll just plan on getting the one planter done today, taking my time on finding good spots to relocate the other iris around the yard.
Stanley Horowitz – Country Living
Fall in Vermont – Crowley Photos – pinterest.com
Filed under Awe-Inspiring Photography, Favorite Quotes
This photo was taken in July, when Molly (left) and Amber (right) first got on the living room dog bed together. Before that, Molly’s sole wish was to disappear or escape. This is no surprise, since Amber is big, doofus, and relentlessly over-friendly, trying to ‘herd’ Molly, always having her huge face right in Molly’s. Molly is 12 – a venerable old lady, with little sense of humor about these things.
About 4 nights ago, we brought Amber’s stuff inside, put her crate and some toys in the utility room where there is another bed like the one you see in the photo above. It’s getting much cooler at night now, and we wanted this to be routine by the time really cold weather gets here. The animals have shown very little problem (other than Amber chewing on the baseboards – more Louisiana Hot Sauce applied), though Molly seems to require more nap time during the day to rest up from a night with Amber.
Just a few minutes ago a miracle occurred – Molly and Amber were PLAYING together!
There was a lot of moving around, growling, etc. When I got up to check on them, there was a “fierce” battle going on, and both dogs were loving it. :0) I can’t tell you how relieved I am in this breakthrough. Molly is standing up for herself, snapping when Amber gets on her nerves too much, but she’s also relaxing and ACCEPTING, and – for at least a little while this afternoon – ENJOYING.
Filed under Amazing Animals, Attitude, Family
“Black Swan” – Paul Militaru Photography
“On Lake” – Paul Militaru Photography
Filed under Paul Militaru Photography
Steven Worth via Kimberly Maus, Fox12 Oregon via Doreen Adamson-Liber
Filed under Awe-Inspiring Photography
CoolFunnyQuotes.com
Snarky, sarcastic, snide – I love all of these. They make me smile, smirk, snort, or laugh out loud. I would never actually SAY these to anyone, but sometimes I would like to…
thegirlcreative-pinterest.com
CoolFunnyQuotes.com
IAmBored.com via Desiree Angelique Hackett
Filed under Attitude, Funny Signs - Humor
We’ve been eating low carb for several years now. Mostly we do well, but every once in a while, we get a craving for something we should be avoiding.
Lately it’s been bread and waffles.
Happily, I found something that will help us a LOT.
Bob’s Red Mill Low Carb Bread Mix
allows me to enjoy a sandwich – a real treat. I can roll up a slice around a hot dog, or cut a slice in two and toast some for garlic bread. 5 net grams per slice. 130 calories. 0 sugar.
My dog also endorses it highly, having sneaked into the kitchen and grabbed it off the counter one time and the very back of the stove top the second before we installed a walk-through gate that bars him from the kitchen.
and Bob’s Red Mill Low Carb Baking Mix.
The baking mix can be used for muffins, pancakes, waffles, and more. Last night I made waffles for the first time in almost 3 three years. (It took me half an hour searching the pantry before I finally found our waffle iron!) I had to add a bit more cream than the recipe called for to get a good consistency for waffles. Even my husband said they were good.
On the waffles we used Maple Grove Farms Low Calorie, Sugar-Free Maple Flavored Syrup. For a 1/4 cup serving, it was
It’s nice to be able to ‘splurge’ without having to feel guilty. :0)
Filed under Uncategorized
Yesterday afternoon I finished digging out the iris from the backyard planter. (I still need to make sure the planter is completely cleaned out, add more potting mix and replant some of the iris, but I declared victory for the day.)
I rewarded myself with some time in my art room.
I’m working on some Christmas presents for my good friends from Lunch Bunch. (Shhhhh! It’s a secret!) The time flies by while I’m up there, thinking of my friends and trying to make something I hope they’ll enjoy. I have quite a few things to make, so I’m hoping I can sneak up there a lot in the coming weeks.
I also have some refurbishing to do on some of our yard art. Our ‘box turtle”
needs an eye re-glued, plus some touch up on peeling pain on his back.
I found some orange “neon” paint. I repaint the orange on both sides of the jack-o-lantern, hoping the paint will make him pop when headlights hit him next year.
We have an 8 foot tall (with stem and leaves) metal flower attached to a power pole in the back yard. Some wasps figured out a way to get between the metal of the flower and the plastic saucer type thing we glued to the center and covered with glass beads. We think our spraying has finally at least caused the wasps to relocate, if not die outright – so we’ll bring this into the shop. I’ll remove the center piece, clean everything up, caulk the center back on and replace the glass pieces that have fallen off.
I’ll work my way around the yard, repairing things as best I can. We’re also looking to repair some other critters still in the shop so that we can attach them to the ham radio tower extra length part we stood in concrete recently.
We have a few things in the shop that need to be repaired or finished that we can hang on here, plus critters we make in the future. This will be our “Critter Tree.” :0)
snappypixels.com
jasoninhollywood.blogspot.com
This isn’t Amber, but it could be.
We’ve shifted Amber’s crate and some chew toys into the utility room inside the house so that she doesn’t have to suffer rain, wind, and the coming winter out on the back porch. There is a huge dog bed in there, and Molly and Bambi (our pit) used to sleep on it together. We’re hoping that Amber will use her crate, if she likes, or sleep on the bed with Molly.
Last night was Night 4 of the new regime. My husband was up in the middle of the night, having trouble sleeping, and he heard ”chewing” but hoped she was chewing on one of the several chew toys we make sure are in there at night.
I discovered this morning she was chewing on the baseboard.
When she was on the porch, she started chewing the wood on one end of the porch. I tried all kinds of home remedies and commercial preparations, finally brushing on Louisiana Hot Sauce. That seemed to have worked. I say it this way because we also were bringing her in the house with us a lot more, and the ‘cure’ might have just been a happy coincidence.
This morning I painted a generous amount of Louisiana Hot Sauce on the baseboard where she has been chewing, and along the rest of it, while I was at it. I’m hopeful that our dog is as much of a wuss as her owners about eating hot things….
Filed under Amazing Animals, Family
Can you hear me smacking my lips from where you are?
My husband and I love waffles and/or pancakes. Since we went low carb several years ago, we haven’t even entertained the notion of actually ever eating one again.
Bob’s Red Mill makes low carb bread mix that I’m loving and also makes a low carb baking mix. I just got some of the baking mix. We looked really hard and finally found a sugar free maple syrup. My husband tried a bit of it – because there wasn’t any point to making waffles or pancakes if the syrup wasn’t good. He pronounced it good!
Tonight, if I haven’t killed myself digging out the iris, I’m going to fix us a batch of waffles. I had to look in the pantry for half an hour to find the waffle iron. :0)
We are really looking forward to biting these.
I’m going to try to finish digging out my iris plants today.
We devoted a square brick planter in the back yard for new iris, with the plan to redistribute them all over the yard when it was time to divide them. We made this bird to “fly” over the planter.
This is the actual planter. You can see that this has really gone nuts in the past two years. I have dug out approximately half of the rhizomes now. I plan to get out there in a few minutes and see if I can finish getting the plants dug out, and the excess roots and leaves cut off. I have one plastic basket in the garage already of the half I dug out recently. I’ll plant some back in this planter, but most of them will go in spots up and down the driveway, out to the shop, and in groupings here and there around the yard.
I started with 15 plants in this planter which is almost 4 feet on each side. I can’t believe how many plants I have now, or how difficult it is to get them out carefully. I have 5 different colors – a bright yellow, a yellow with a brown striped ‘beard,’ a pretty blue, some small purple, and I THINK a fuchsia, though I’m not sure.
I have a really nice day to work outside, so please wish me luck on finishing up the digging out today.
Filed under Arkansas, Gardening, Greenwood, Mother Nature
Lauren DeStefano via Country Living
“Fall” – Paul Militaru Photography
Filed under Favorite Quotes, Paul Militaru Photography
creativeartworksblog 